Vikram Chandra's Constant Journey
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JOURNAL OF ENGLISH STUDIES, II (2000), 93-111 VIKRAM CHANDRA’S CONSTANT JOURNEY: SWALLOWING THE WORLD1 DORA SALES SALVADOR Universidad Jaume I de Castellón ABSTRACT. The purpose of this paper is to account for the challenging hybridity and in-betweenness that derives from the presence of non-Western traces in contemporary fiction written in a global language. Among the huge and ever-growing group of the so-called “new literatures in English”, the focus will be placed on Vikram Chandra’s novel Red Earth and Pouring Rain (1995). This Indian author, who lives between Bombay and Washington, is a real master when it comes to fictionalized oral storytelling, echoing the traditional Indian epics –the Ramayana and the Mahabharata. It is no wonder, then, that Chandra would define himself as a storyteller. The generic shaping of a text tends to voice the ontological conception of literature that an author has, as it is the case with Chandra’s transcultural narrative. His work, delineated on the borders between oral rite and written fiction, displays an intersystemic dialogue in which literature becomes a space of intercultural communication, an endless journey. What a mean economy of love and belonging it must be, in which one love is always traded in for another, in which a heart is so small that it can only contain one jannat, one heaven. How fearsome must be this empty land where each new connection must inevitably mean the loss of all roots, all family, each song you may have ever sung in the past. Vikram Chandra ... how can the human world live its difference; how can a human being live Other-wise? Homi Bhabha 1. I would like to express my deepest gratitude to Vikram Chandra for his generous friendship, affection and support. The research carried out for the writing of this paper has been financed by the Generalitat Valenciana, Spain. FPI00-07-210. 93 DORA SALES SALVADOR Much of the most innovative writing in English today comes from outside the Western world, from places such as Africa, Asia or the Caribbean, where many creative authors have adopted the former colonizing language as a lingua franca for communication. Centres and peripheries have been redefined, and these voices are strong contributions to the present revision of the literary canon, certainly problematized by emerging and ever-growing fields of (cross)cultural analysis, namely post-colonial theory and criticism, cultural studies or minority discourse theory, among others. Such writings are new not only in that the nation-states from which they have come are new but also in the sense that they show fresh styles and themes, revitalized creative forces coming from their native cultures. If a canon, usually related to power, is regarded as a list of authors or works which are considered to be valid and honoured to be studied, then one of the most important points about the so-called “new writings in English” is that they call into question the traditional hegemony of Western literature. Though largely marginalized or considered as “exotic”, their demonstrable interest and quality challenge conventional ways of thinking about ourselves, the others and the world around us all. Regarding literary prizes as a way of legitimating and revealing how “newness” comes into the world, it seems undeniable that for the last decades some of the most prestigious awards for literature written in English have gone to voices coming from outside Great Britain. If we look at the national British literature honor, the Booker Prize, we will notice that in recent years it has been granted to authors such as V.S. Naipaul, Nadine Gordimer, Ruth Prawer Jhabvala, Salman Rushdie, Thomas Keneally, J. M. Coetzee, Keri Hulme, Kazuo Ishiguro, Ben Okri, Michael Ondaatje and Arundhati Roy. The 1999 Booker Prize has gone to J.M. Coetzee’s Disgrace, enabling this author to be the first one to win this Prize twice, while Anita Desai has been shortlisted once more, this time for Fasting, Feasting. In the United States, the 2000 Pulitzer Prize has been awarded to Jhumpa Lahiri, for her Interpreter of Maladies. All in all, clearly something beyond marketplace is working here. It is widely agreed that India was the first of the “new” or newly-independent nations to have a large and really established literature in English (Birch et al 1996: 11). The first novels –according to the Western conception of the genre– that appeared in India in the late nineteenth century were written in the vernacular languages, and the first novelists to write originally in English emerged during the thirties, a time of political struggle marked by the rise of the nationalist movement and Gandhian ideals, as Rachel Dwyer (2000: 45) notes. Regarding the beginnings of the English-written novel in India, three major writers should be named: Mulk Raj Anand, Raja Rao and R.K. Narayan. After them, many voices have contributed to the international acknowledgement of Indian literature written in the English language. In India, however, there is an open debate dealing with the linguistic question, within the anxious walls of modern nationalism and politics. All in all, recently, Indian writers who have chosen to live in 94 VIKRAM CHANDRA’S CONSTANT JOURNEY: SWALLOWING THE WORLD the United States –like Vikram Seth, Pico Iyer, Bharati Mukherjee, Sashi Tharoor and Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni– have launched the Indian literatures in English into fresh and emergent territories. Within this growing intercultural group of writers, Vikram Chandra is an enticing talent that proposes “yarns of yarns” to entertain audiences all over the world. Chiefly, Chandra’s fiction accounts for a transcultural project. In his works one can consider that writing is understood as a way of recovering and intercommunicating cultures, but also as an open proposal that suggests another sort of creation that goes beyond fetish dichotomies between native and foreign traces, local and universal, past and present. The past comes back in order to actualize its relevance for contemporary happenings. But the future is always a treasure that has to be taken care of and constructed day by day. The task at hand would seem to consist in striving for a “beyond”, to go beyond fossilized discoursive positions, travelling from one space to another, from one temporality to another, making all of them simultaneous: to be here and there at the same time. What remains clear is that there is no return to a pristine origin, that all we have is the present, the future and our memory of the past. In more than one sense, nowadays we could consider the existence or formation of a “post-colonial narrative paradigm”, which could be mainly identified with these three features: a) the silencing and marginalizing of the post-colonial voice by the imperial centre; b) the abrogation of this imperial centre within the text; and c) the active appropriation of the language and culture of that centre (Ashcroft et al 1994: 83).2 From this vantage point, language is a fundamental site of struggle for post-colonial discourses, because the colonial process involves language as a mechanism of oppression. There are several responses to the dominance of the imperial language, but clearly we could think about two main paths: rejection or subversion. For the most part, Ngugi (1981) could be an instance of the first alternative. After a period writing in English about his native Kenya, he has refused to submit to the political dominance English usage implies, fostering translation as a necessary communicative bridge among the different languages of the world. In the Indian context, Kachru (1983; 1990) shows how English has provided a neutral vehicle for communication between contesting language groups, while the writer Raja Rao voices, in a piece written in 1938 as a foreword to his novel Kanthapura, the challenge of the post-colonial writer to adapt the colonial language to local needs and realities: “One has to convey in a language that is not one’s own the spirit that is one’s own” (Rao 1989: v). Perhaps, the appropriation of a tongue is essentially a subversive strategy, for the adaptation of the standard language to the demands and requirements of the place and culture into which it has been 2. On post-colonial literatures see also the helpful studies of Boehmer (1995), Loomba (1998) and Walder (1998). 95 DORA SALES SALVADOR appropriated amounts to a far more subtle rejection of the political power of the colonizing language. In Salman Rushdie’s words, “to conquer English may be to complete the process of making ourselves free” (Rushdie 1982: 17). As Vikram Chandra (2000a) states, writing in English is an advantage because this is the lingua franca of power, business, cultural exchange, politics. And, using this language in creative writing, he has forgotten nothing, he has given up nothing. The rewriting and rescue of the “other” History, the silenced one, which does not appear in the official historical accounts created by monolithical discourses, is a main topic in post-colonial literature criticism, sometimes related to post-modern historiographic metafiction.3 The colonized were usually the objects of someone else’s story. In the aftermath of colonization, many voices felt an irresistible need to retell, to write the counterhistory, showing that the centre cannot –and should not– hold, fighting for the reinscription of their memory, silenced for too long. Lately, however, the term and concept of “postcolonialism” is itself being sharply interrogated. In any case, I prefer to speak about transcultural narratives, using a terminology and conceptualization taken from Latin American criticism (Ortiz 1973; Rama 1987). The transcultural identity is not predicated upon the idea of the disappearance of independent cultural traditions, but rather on their continual and mutual development.